I 100% agree with you and another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622990

I spent years in Clojure and found that writing code in the REPL just... isn't fun. This has been true for every interactive system I've ever used (including... the shell).

The shell as a REPL for a succinct language is nice for interactive workflows, but for trying to build less ephemeral pieces of code, the editor is the first class citizen I care about. Sending code to a REPL to be interacted with? Cool, and I think this is what a lot of people mean when they say REPL-driven.

I'd imagine convenience around that in a language or its tooling would be what convinces me to do more REPL-style things.